With the usual bleeting by the lefty carrot crunchers than jobs would be created and the "green" industry would boom we see that the Corus plant in Recar has been mothballed by the Indian owners Tata (Appropriate name) in order to recieve £600 million in EU Carbon allowances.

Already, yes Already jobs are being scythed by these horrendous wealth "redistribution" policies and I fear that in the next 5 years pretty much what is left of our productive industries will be moved to third-world countries. Then what?

It might also be worth mentioning that:

Dr Pachauri, railway engineer and chairman of the UN IPCC is director-general of the TATAEnergy Research Institute which is funded by TATA.

No bias there then!

So the government will auction of the carbon credits and that money will go straight into government coffers (to pay the unemployment money of the laid-off workers no doubt).

You make it sound like TATA closed their plant so as to get the carbon credits...DUH ! The carbon credits were directed AFTER TATA decided to pull out and TATA made nothing out of them.

That aside, while I DO agree that there will be some greedy people who will try to make money out of climate change - just like similar people made pots of money out of world wars - that is no excuse for ignoring the fact that climate change is real and it is here already.

In fact I would say that BECAUSE this is happening we have to re-double our efforts to ensure that we are not sidetracked by this animalistic fact of human nature.

I always look suspiciously at foreign companies coming here to "save" British companies going down the tubes as more often than not they are just doing it so that they can buy it up on the cheap and asset strip it at the earliest convenience.

Such phenomenon has nothing whatsoever to do with the buying and selling of carbon licences even if our Andrew seems to think it does.

Like the old reds-under-the-beds conspiracy theorists the climate-change-is-a-lie conspiracy theorists are nothing more than head-in-the-sand rabble-rousers.

As you obviously don't know how carbon offsetting works here is an explanation:

Emissions tradingFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A central authority (usually a governmental body) sets a limit or cap on the amount of a pollutant that can be emitted. Companies or other groups are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of allowances (or credits) which represent the right to emit a specific amount. The total amount of allowances and credits cannot exceed the cap, limiting total emissions to that level. Companies that need to increase their emission allowance must buy credits from those who pollute less. The transfer of allowances is referred to as a trade. In effect, the buyer is paying a charge for polluting, while the seller is being rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than was needed. Thus, in theory, those who can reduce emissions most cheaply will do so, achieving the pollution reduction at the lowest cost to society.[1]

There are active trading programs in several air pollutants. For greenhouse gases the largest is the European Union Emission Trading Scheme.[2] In the United States there is a national market to reduce acid rain and several regional markets in nitrogen oxides.[3] Markets for other pollutants tend to be smaller and more localized.

I have already agreed that while the habit of trading in emission licences is not a perfect idea it does mean that the rich countries that can afford to BUY such licences are being punished in monetary terms for polluting. The countries that pollute less - that have the licences for sale - are therefore rewarded by the rich countries for their ability to keep below the set CO2 output targets for that country.

Sadly this does - as you suggest - mean that the rich countries like India and China and America and the European states can continue to pollute just because they can afford to.

If nothing better comes out of this idea than making the polluters pay then that is at least somewhere to start, don't you think ?

"If nothing better comes out of this idea than making the polluters pay then that is at least somewhere to start, don't you think ?"

Emm not really as our industries here in the West are being destroyed day by day so we will not be able to "pollute" anymore anyway. By the way paps pollution is when there is so much concentration of a certain element that it makes it difficult for inhabitants of the local area to breath etc. Last time I checked I can still breath, where abouts in the West is there so much emissions that we can't breath?

I could stand near a volcano and be gassed by sulphur but that wouldn't count as pollution because it is not man-made is it?